Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Podcasts, Partnerships, and Laboratories for American Music

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19452349.40.4.20

1945-2349

Nathan Platte,

Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media

I might not have gotten involved with podcasts, were it not for two colleagues, an undergraduate student, and Dolly Parton.For the past two and a half years, I have studied, produced, and taught from podcasts. They have changed my relationship to American music and those who care for its many streams. In this essay, I will share some observations on how podcasts may help us reflect differently on the values that propel our work as scholars and teachers. In my case, a variety of circumstances led me to the format, which in turn facilitated forms of connection and collaboration that I had not originally envisioned. As a disclaimer and invitation, I do not offer these thoughts from a position of podcasterly prestige or authority. There are other music scholars whose work in this medium is more widely known and explicitly anchored to American music studies. But I share my account as a podcast dabbler in the hope that it may offer some reassurance: yes, you can do this too. Whether you are a podcast aficionado or simply hoping to explore alternative methods of research and teaching, the following may offer some encouragement.It helped that I have a friend who has a podcast. Trevor Harvey, my colleague at the University of Iowa, hosts Ethnomusicology Today, a podcast for the Society for Ethnomusicology in which he speaks with scholars about recently published research. He also uses the podcast for student mentoring. Each semester, a couple undergraduates would learn the basics of recording and digital audio editing while preparing episodes. Ethnomusicology Today has episodes reaching back to 2015, but it did not occur to me for a while that I might use podcasting in my own work. Then in 2019 Nadine Hubbs (another contributor to this issue) visited Iowa as a guest speaker. While meeting informally with students and faculty, she described the forthcoming release of Dolly Parton's America, a nine-episode podcast hosted by Jad Abumrad and Shima Oliaee. If you don't already know, Nadine's voice brims with enthusiasm and conviction. She praised Abumrad's earlier crafting of audio narratives for the podcast Radiolab, and her own thoughtful work with Parton's “Jolene” (including a fantastic additional verse) was featured in one of the episodes of Dolly Parton's America. I started listening.Many podcasts offer recorded discussions or monologues in the manner of talk radio. But plenty of podcasts offer something akin to a documentary film freed from the limiting structures of visual editing. Here, varying types of audio collide, overlap, and intertwine. Dolly Parton's America belongs in this second category. The eclectic sound of the series fascinated me. Abumrad, Oliaee, and their production team interwove archival media from radio, albums, television, film, audio books, original music, and remixes. They captured location audio from Dollywood, college classrooms, and visits to people's homes. They drew together new and historical interviews from scholars (like Nadine), family members, friends, musicians, and music industry professionals. Strategically scripted passages bridged less formal conversations and reactions. All of this was stitched—and sometimes whimsically pasted—in a manner that was virtuosic and engrossing. As a scholar of film music and sound, this layering of audio elements to render imaginative soundscapes struck a chord. Podcasts such as Dolly Parton's America reflexively foregrounded their own sonic materiality, reinforcing Marshall McLuhan's dictum that the medium is the message.1 One could speak thoughtfully about American music and culture while also annotating and reframing musical ideas in a format that—like music itself—involved the artful arrangement of sounded ideas. Dolly Parton's America also illustrated the extent to which particular topics in American music—particularly those that have left a wide trail of media artifacts—offer rich opportunities for exploring American musical practices through the podcast format.During the same semester, Anastasia Scholze, an undergraduate student from one of my courses, asked about collaborating on a research project. Iowa's Center for Research by Undergraduates supports such efforts by offering credit hours or stipends to student researchers. This was the very program that Trevor had used to recruit students’ contributions to Ethnomusicology Today. Between Nadine's recommendation and Trevor's mentoring of undergraduate students through the podcast, it seemed like a good time to give the format a try. Anastasia and I started planning a series related to my research on film music and, in particular, the soundscapes of Hollywood director Robert Wise. Fittingly, Wise had started in sound editing before moving to film editing (where he famously helped assemble the visual and sonic montages of Citizen Kane [1941]) and shifted to directing films with conspicuous musical and sonic features, including The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Odds against Tomorrow (1959), The Haunting (1963), The Sound of Music (1965), and The Andromeda Strain (1971).We had begun making plans for the first episode on Wise's film adaptation of West Side Story (1961) when the pandemic postponed all in-person university activities. In the midst of COVID, the nascent podcast was one project that could continue in a remote format. We borrowed audio equipment from Trevor; we learned the basics of digital audio workstations (DAWs); and we recorded an interview over Zoom with Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, a Puerto Rican cinema scholar who had written West Side Story as Cinema: The Making and Impact of an American Masterpiece.2 We studied podcasts and experimented with scripted and conversational formats. It took months to do this work. In addition to the disruptions of the pandemic, there were the normal hurdles and detours that come with learning any new skill set. For instance, we had to consider how the presence of Ernesto's voice might best be incorporated within a larger discussion of Robert Wise's career and West Side Story's stylized representation of New York City and Bernstein's music. This was more than just a matter of dropping in quotes that served a particular argument. We had to consider and honor his voice as a character within a larger audio narrative.Then, with so many plans and activities canceled, I did something moderately impulsive. FilmScene, Iowa City's independent cinema, announced in June of 2020 that the closure of its two locations would be extended indefinitely. I reached out to Rebecca Fons, the theater's programming director, and volunteered to make a podcast that would feature discussions around titles they were offering to members via “virtual” screening rooms. The idea was that the podcast would provide freely available programming for theater patrons and, in a small way, sustain community and conversation during a stretch of intense isolation. I was not a stranger to FilmScene—I had led a series on film scores at the theater before—but I had not completed a single podcast episode. Nevertheless, FilmScene supported the idea: Rebecca and I would co-host a new series called FilmCastPodScene. I would handle audio production; FilmScene would manage announcements and distribution.The partnership with FilmScene might seem tangential to American music, but it was here that things began to grow in directions that were exciting, necessary, and unplanned. As programming director, Rebecca took the lead on structuring the content of our episodes. She selected the films for discussion and also scheduled guests. We interviewed directors, local patrons, and various specialists. It reminded me of the best parts of being a student. For each episode, I studied assigned films and directors, prepared questions, and drafted outlines with my cohost. Rebecca encouraged me to bring my own background to the table, so film sound became a recurring motif in a podcast that was not limited to that subtopic. And yet many of the films we discussed were on topics related to American music, such as River City Drumbeat (2020), a documentary profiling Edward “Nardie” White and the role of his drum corps program in a predominantly Black community in Louisville, Kentucky. Multiple directors with whom we spoke, such as Haroula Rose and Noah Hutton, had written music for their own films. And others, aware of my background in music, were eager to divulge details about the relationships they cultivated with musicians through their films.The partnership resulted in my learning much more about contemporary film music practices than I had expected. I relished a form of discovery that felt more open and less tethered to my particular research niche. While I could continue to draw upon my expertise in studio-era Hollywood, I also had to orient myself to less familiar fields as I learned about independent features and documentaries from Rebecca and our guests, whose musical interests were vast and quite different from my own.When I first began planning a podcast on film music with Anastasia, I had thought podcasting would be a new outlet for my research that might find an audience beyond the reach of academic publishing. Although that plan had not dissolved, it was less central to the endeavor. Instead, podcasting had become a space for mentoring students and, somewhat serendipitously, partnering with local institutions and filmmakers during an extraordinary time.The two podcasts took different formats and progressed at different rates. FilmCastPodScene was predominantly conversational; we released a new episode every two weeks but slowed down after theaters reopened a year later.3 It was through editing and mastering the episodes for that series that I honed my (modest) production skills for Sounding Cinema, the podcast that Anastasia and I developed around Robert Wise. Sounding Cinema's episodes are released intermittently. It quickly became apparent that keeping the format varied and experimental would allow more students to contribute amidst multiple commitments without worrying about meeting a strict production schedule. The podcast is now a lab for students to explore film music and sound through the collaborative process of podcast design. The episodes’ structures vary. Anastasia and I produced two episodes on West Side Story that are largely scripted. Then I invited three students from a film course to join Anastasia for a discussion panel that yielded two more episodes: one on The Sound of Metal (2019, recommended by a listener) and the French musical, Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). These students, with majors in musicology, film studies, and communication studies, had expressed interest in podcasting, and Sounding Cinema provided an opportunity for them to contribute to the series in a manner that was collaborative and flexible. One student from the discussion panel, Cecilia Kryzda, stayed on as a cohost and editor. As of this writing, Sounding Cinema's most recent episode is an interview with Jack Curtis Dubowsky on his book, Easy Listening and Film Scoring, 1948–1978 (New York: Routledge, 2021).4 We have two more episodes in production, each a blend of scripted narration, discussion, and musical excerpts.My meandering journey through podcasting has changed how I think about my role as an academic and my research efforts in American music. Producing podcasts has helped me appreciate how arranging and adapting music and commentary through a DAW can expand our analytical horizons. A podcast on film music, for example, presents opportunities not available in print or visual media, such as the ability to spotlight a particular timbre independent of notation or a film clip. The labor of selecting and mixing media clips also illuminates new sonic details that become more legible through the act of digital processing. Even the seemingly innocuous task of editing conversations involves questions of identity and representation. Do I place a pause within a speaker's sentence to lend their observation special emphasis? What about vocality and its mediation through technology? In what ways do decisions around microphones, equalization, and compressors affect the articulation and reception of ideas voiced by ourselves and others? As a community that cares deeply about sounding experiences and the plurality of perspectives that American musics embody, such questions resonate with possibility.These concerns also have implications for study and teaching. Like Dolly Parton's America, many podcasts pursue varied methods for engaging with American music through illustration, contextualization, and analysis. In most of my courses, I now assign or recommend podcast episodes from Meet the Composer, Art of the Score, Song Exploder, or Aria Code and ask students to reflect on the ways in which podcasts integrate sources, commentary, and musical examples to represent differing perspectives. Students often point to the ways in which podcasts elicit a fluid form of awareness that differs from reading prose. Such listening can help attune us to the musical inflections and structures within our own research, whether in written or spoken forms.One does not need to make or study podcasts about specifically American music to learn from the format. Similarly, podcasts do not have a monopoly on any of the above lessons, which may be sought through other media and public-facing activities. But there are two qualities that I think make the podcast a particularly valuable tool for students and scholars of American music.The first is the relative accessibility of the format. Most podcasts are freely available, which means they can be shared with students and the general public without recourse to subscriptions or university logins. (Some podcasts will subject listeners to ads.) In addition, a number of podcasts offer dialogue transcriptions for greater accessibility. Also, the basic tools for making a podcast (microphone and digital audio workstation) are available to those with a laptop or phone. This makes it easy to tentatively explore the format and have students do the same. (Producing a public-radio-quality podcast requires more investment, although the price point is low compared to visual media.)The second feature of podcasting concerns its accommodation of collaboration and partnerships that transcend disciplinary and professional silos. This is especially critical for American music studies, which is fundamentally interdisciplinary but is not always as diverse, public facing, or collaborative as many might wish. The study and production of podcasts on American music can meaningfully address the imperative to diversify voices within the field and proactively connect those working in other fields, particularly beyond academia. In podcasts on American music, one finds perspectives from musicians, journalists, producers, professors, and students edited together to create polyphonic profiles of American music. Such projects can nurture connections among students, local partners, and more distant colleagues. Whether we pursue podcasting as a vessel for formal research projects or a means of enacting new partnerships, the format invites us to reflect on how the presence of new voices—and not merely others’ words—stand to enrich and move the discussions that shape the field.